Playing with my camera

I’ve had a lot of cameras so far. As a kid, my first camera as a kid was a Kodak Instamatic that used a film cassette so you didn’t actually have to load the film onto the spool. I also remember licking the flash cubes that you plugged into the top of the camera and then discarded. It was supposed to make them work better. I bought my first Single Lens Reflex camera when I moved out and went to work. Since then I’ve had a series of film cameras and, when digital came along, I traded my film cameras for digital ones. Some have been point-and-shoot; some have been superzooms; one has been a digital SLR and my current camera is a relatively new mirrorless digital.

As the cameras and the software that drives them have become more sophisticated, I have become more confused. Cameras today will make absolutely all the decisions for me and, most times I don’t want that. To try to subdue the confusion I returned to my first understandings of photography when to have a built-in light meter was a luxury and to see a photo required a two-week wait while the film got developed. Photography, I reminded myself, is all about light.

In the simplest form it’s how much light falls on whatever captures it. When I had my first camera it was film.  Now it’s a sensor.  To get light to the senor you need a hole = aperture.  Bigger hole = more light; smaller hole = less light. You also have a way to open and close the hole = shutter. Leave the hole open for longer = more light; open and close the hole quickly = less light. The third variable in photography is the sensitivity of whatever captures the light in order to form an image. Fast film was grainier but required less light to create and image. Slow film was sharper but required more light to create an image. Today’s equivalent is ISO value. I’ve read what that stands for and I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment.  What I need to know is  that a high number means fast and a small number means slow. Hey, I drive a car and I understand speed limits. I can do this.

Last summer before we went on a month-long adventure cruise to the Arctic I decided I would shoot in only manual mode: I would tell the camera what aperture, shutter speed and ISO I wanted rather than letting it do the thinking.  There are times when it makes absolute sense to let the camera do the thinking but I want to really understand what decisions I’m turning over to it and choose wisely how much to let it do. I missed a lot of shots on manual as I turned dials the wrong way or forgot which dial controlled which function. What’s more, I’ll continue to miss shots but I’m sticking with manual until making decisions becomes automatic for me, not for the camera. Do I need more light? What’s the best way to get that? Is a fast shutter speed more important to catch a bird in flight or is the aperture more important to get the cat on the walk and the tree in the background in focus at the same time? Is it dusk when there’s not a lot of light or is it the middle of the day when I need to reign in the amount of light hitting the sensor? I’m not at lightning speed using the camera controls and I’ll continue to miss shots. I’m prepared to stick with it though and, in a strange way, boiling the whole thing down to three variables has given me a chance to relax about the photos I take. It’s always, always a trade-off when setting up a shot. Come to think of it, buying a camera in the first place is requires a series of trade-offs but that’s the subject of another post. Stay tuned.